VMware Explore is back in Las Vegas this year, running August 31 – September 3, 2026 at The Venetian Convention and Expo Center. The session catalog is live, and as always it’s enormous — hundreds of breakouts, tutorials, and hands-on labs to sort through.
I’ve been working through it and building out my schedule, and a clear theme emerged for me this year: getting the absolute most out of VMware Cloud Foundation 9 — more performance, lower TCO, smarter hardware decisions, and a genuinely cloud-like operating model running in your own data center. These five sessions sit right at the top of my list. Here’s what each one covers and why I think it’s worth your time.
1. A Deep Dive: What’s New for VMware vSphere in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 [CLOB1082LV]
Breakout Session
Speakers: Bob Plankers (Product Management & Marketing) and Dave Morera (Staff Technical Marketing Architect), Broadcom
vSphere is the engine at the heart of VCF, and 9.1 brings a fresh round of changes to the compute layer. Bob and Dave walk through the newest vSphere innovations in VCF 9.1 — the new technologies, the behavioral changes, and the key differences practitioners need to understand before they upgrade.
Why I’d attend: This is the fastest way to get current on the platform. Instead of piecing the story together from release notes and scattered blog posts, you get a curated tour from two of the best technical communicators in the ecosystem. Knowing exactly what changed — and what behaves differently — before you touch production is the difference between a smooth upgrade and a long weekend. This is my anchor session for the 9.1 compute story.
2. 10 Tips for Reusing Existing Hardware for VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Deployments [CLOB1216LV]
Breakout Session
Speakers: Kristopher Groh (Director, Product Management) and John Nicholson (vSAN Technical Marketing), Broadcom
One of the first questions on any VCF 9 migration is simple: can I keep the servers I already own? This session gives you a practical framework for evaluating your existing hosts against the requirements for VCF, vSAN, and NSX, so you know what carries forward and what needs to be refreshed.
Why I’d attend: Hardware is usually the single biggest line item in any platform refresh. Ten concrete, field-tested tips for reusing what you already have can translate directly into budget you don’t have to spend. John Nicholson in particular has a gift for turning vSAN hardware nuance into plain English. If you’re planning a VCF 9 move, this session could genuinely pay for your trip.
3. Avoiding the RAM-pocalypse: Unlock Total Cost of Ownership Savings with VMware Memory Tiering [CLOB1046LV]
Breakout Session
Speakers: Dave Morera (Staff Technical Marketing Architect) and Arvind Jagannath (Sr Technology Product Manager, VCF), Broadcom
Memory has become one of the most expensive and constrained resources in the modern data center. This session digs into VMware Memory Tiering — how it keeps hot data in DRAM while moving colder pages out to cheaper media — and the TCO impact that can follow, with savings claimed at up to 40% without sacrificing performance.
Why I’d attend: If your refresh quotes are being driven through the roof by DIMM prices, this is the session that tackles it head-on. Memory Tiering is one of the more genuinely impactful efficiency features in recent memory (pun intended), and understanding how it decides what’s “hot” versus “cold” is the key to trusting it with production workloads. Come for the title, stay for a serious conversation about doing more with the memory you can actually afford.
4. Cloud Operating Model Realized: Architecting VPCs in VMware Cloud Foundation 9 [CLOB1327LV]
Breakout Session
Speakers: Luca Camarda (Solutions Architect) and Thomas Vigneron (Product Manager), Broadcom
VCF 9 brings Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) constructs to the private cloud, aiming to replace the old tangle of VLANs, manual IPAM entries, and scattered firewall rules with the kind of self-service, public-cloud-style networking teams have come to expect from the hyperscalers. This session covers how to architect those VPCs in your own data center.
Why I’d attend: This is the networking session for anyone trying to deliver a true cloud operating model on-prem. If you’ve ever envied how quickly you can stand up an isolated network in a public cloud, VPCs are how you bring that experience home. For platform teams and architects thinking about self-service and multi-tenancy, it’s a forward-looking, design-level talk worth blocking out.
5. A Hardware Smörgåsbord: Practical Tips and Tricks for Server Deployments [CLOT1185LV]
Tutorial
Speakers: Bob Plankers (Product Management & Marketing) and John Nicholson (vSAN Technical Marketing), Broadcom
A grab-bag tutorial covering the hardware fundamentals that quietly make or break a virtual environment — power and cooling, component and server sizing, and a buffet of other practical considerations that shape performance, maintainability, and how long your gear stays in service.
Why I’d attend: This is the kind of accumulated, hard-won wisdom you normally only pick up after years of running data centers, distilled into a single tutorial. Because it’s a tutorial rather than a standard breakout, expect more depth and more room for the practical “here’s what actually bites you” detail. Bob and John together is a fantastic pairing for this material. Whether you’re spec’ing brand-new hosts or just want to stop repeating old mistakes, there’s something on this table for you.
Why these five together
Line them up and a story emerges. Three of these sessions — hardware reuse, Memory Tiering, and the hardware smörgåsbord — are fundamentally about cost and efficiency: squeezing maximum value out of the hardware you buy or already own. The other two — the vSphere 9.1 deep dive and VPC architecture — are about capability: what’s new, and how to operate it like a cloud. Put together, that’s the entire VCF 9 value proposition in five sessions: do more, spend less, and run it like a hyperscaler. That’s exactly the conversation I want to be having in Las Vegas this year.
Add them to your schedule
Use the heart icon in the Explore catalog to favorite each session and build out your personal agenda. Popular deep-dives fill up fast, so it’s worth reserving your seats early. Here are the five codes for quick reference:
- CLOB1082LV — What’s New for vSphere in VCF 9.1
- CLOB1216LV — 10 Tips for Reusing Existing Hardware for VCF 9
- CLOB1046LV — Avoiding the RAM-pocalypse: VMware Memory Tiering
- CLOB1327LV — Architecting VPCs in VCF 9
- CLOT1185LV — A Hardware Smörgåsbord (Tutorial)
If you can only make a handful of sessions this year, this is the lineup I’d build a day around. See you at The Venetian.
